Quebec: un pays, une culture.

FRANCOISE TETU DE LABSADE. Le Quebec: un pays, une culture (deuxieme edition revue et augmentee). Montreal: Boreal, 2001. Pp. 575.

The second edition of Francoise Tetu de Labsade's overview of Quebec culture, Quebec: un pays, une culture, appears only ten years after the first, but the events of that decade have prompted not only a useful updating but a reframing of some of the original material. This reframing risks extending to the title itself: the concept of a homogeneous Quebec culture is just what has been called into question in the multicultural 1990s. In the preface to the original edition, sociologist Fernand Dumont listed "the integration of immigrants" among the "anguishing problems" with which Quebecois have to contend. Writing ten years later, Francoise Tetu de Labsade describes a society becoming more and more multiethnic, especially in Montreal. Although the author persists in her belief that, even with its "diverse mentalities," Quebec is indeed un pays, une culture, she refuses a simplistic portrait. Not simply the creation of early colonizers from France, as the earlier edition may have let it appear, Quebec culture is now, much more clearly, perceived as formed by metissage, the francophone majority culture having been profoundly marked by Amerindians, English, Etats-Uniens, and various groups of immigrants.

Reflecting this new emphasis, material relating to the "genesis of a nation" is made the topic of a separate chapter, allowing room for a seven-page discussion of an expanded Quebec identity, which replaces a one-page treatment of "multiethnicity" in the previous edition. Taking as its title the hopeful, quasi-official formulation, "autant de facons d'etre Quebecois," this chapter begins with a long section on the First Nations, recognized as having populated the territory prior to the arrival of French and British settlers. Changes in Amerindian societies are brought up to date with accounts of recent conflicts over native rights and the surprising statistical revelation that the number of Quebecois claiming native ancestry doubled between 1991 and 1996, reflecting a resurgence of pride in ...